State Department: Oh, by the way, Hillary used a private Blackberry too, not a secure government-issued one; Update: No one read Hillary’s e-mails before deletion?

AllahpunditPosted at 4:01 pm on March 12, 2015

Via the Free Beacon, maybe she figured that since foreign hackers were already reading her e-mails through her private server, there was no point in locking down her Blackberry either. Two words for Boehner and the House GOP: Preemptive impeachment.

I think Psaki’s actually trying to help Hillary in saying this, strange as that may seem. Remember when Her Majesty said at her press conference that she thought it’d be inconvenient to carry separate Blackberries for her personal and work e-mail? And we all laughed at the suggestion that modern smart devices could only handle one dedicated e-mail account? There’s a reason she said that, says Psaki — until last year, if you wanted to access State Department e-mail remotely, you needed a secure Blackberry issued by State for that purpose. And that Blackberry only handled department e-mail, i.e. State e-mail accounts actually did require a dedicated device. Apparently Hillary was right in thinking that, if she wanted to read private e-mail too, she really would have had to carry a second device.

But rather than do that and endure the hardship of fitting two four-ounce smartphones in her purse instead of one, she chose to defy security protocols and conduct all of her business, work and personal, from her unsecured private device. She didn’t care enough about security to have an official State e-mail account created for her in the first place so why would she care enough to read sensitive messages on an official, secured State Blackberry? That adds a whole new level of risk to her e-mail habits, actually, since she was presumably using her personal Blackberry for work during overseas trips, when she was at greater risk from foreign surveillance. Between that and the fact that State IT techs warned her about the vulnerability of her private server, there’s really no question that she knowingly, willingly created a major hole in national security simply because her selfish political desire to keep her messages away from the voting public was more important to her.

And contrary to popular belief, Hillary didn’t say at her presser that she had never accessed classified information from her private account. She said she never sent classified “material.” What does that mean, wonders Andy McCarthy:

First, since we’re dealing with Clintonian parsing here, we must consider the distinction between classified documents and classified information — the latter being what is laid out in the former. It is not enough for a government official with a top-secret clearance to refrain from storing classified documents on private e-mail; the official is also forbidden to discuss the information contained in those documents.

The fact that Mrs. Clinton says she did not store classified documents on her private server, which is very likely true, does not discount the distinct possibility that she discussed classified matters in private e-mails. We would not be able to judge that absent reviewing the e-mails. If any of the 31,830 withheld e-mails from the private, non-secure system — involving America’s top diplomat who was in constant discussions with other important diplomats, top military and national-security officials, her trusted advisers, and even the president of the United States — touched on classified matters, that could land Mrs. Clinton in very hot legal water. It would be a powerful incentive to hit the “delete” key.

By the way, Martin O’Malley is starting to drop hints about getting into the race. Does he dare make an issue of her crumbling natsec credibility if he runs? Er … no, probably not.

How did Hillary Clinton know that the tens of thousands of emails from her time in office she ordered destroyed were personal? Did she or even her staff scroll through her sent items scanning emails about “yoga routines” or “family vacations” before deleting them? Nope. No one looked at them. The Clinton campaign said those emails that did not crop up in a keyword search performed by her team were automatically deleted. No eyes. No one to be subpoenaed. Just highlight all and press delete. That method seems better for missing emails than to finding them. And it would sound reckless and haphazard coming from another politician. In this case, though it sounds like a woman covering her tracks in preparation for a long and bloody legal fight over subpoenas to come…

Time: “For more than a year after she left office in 2013, she did not transfer work-related email from her private account to the State Department. She commissioned a review of the 62,320 messages in her account only after the department–spurred by the congressional investigation–asked her to do so. And this review did not involve opening and reading each email; instead, Clinton’s lawyers created a list of names and keywords related to her work and searched for those. Slightly more than half the total cache–31,830 emails–did not contain any of the search terms, according to Clinton’s staff, so they were deemed to be ‘private, personal records.’”

So, contra what the law says, she didn’t meaningfully review her e-mails at all to see which were public and private. She blinded herself, no doubt intentionally, by resorting to crude keyword filters instead. E.g., if she had written an e-mail about Chris Stevens’s death and referred to him as “CS” and made no references to Benghazi by name, a keyword search for “Stevens” and “Benghazi” would have missed it. That e-mail would have been marked “personal” even though it clearly wasn’t. And deleted. There’s simply no way that her keyword searches were so thorough that every last message in a 31,000-message pile really was personal rather than work-related.

And again, this was surely intentional. She needed a way to argue that she had kinda sorta complied with the law without actually complying with. So she came up with the keyword search, which she knew would miss all sorts of unhelpful stuff. You didn’t expect her and her endless array of staffers to actually read through 60,000+ e-mails, did you? That’s the way chumps who are bound by the rules do things.

Update: A lawyer friend says that e-mail document production via keyword search is used in litigation — but that the search terms are typically negotiated between the parties. Did State have a say in which terms Hillary used or did Her Majesty decide unilaterally? Also, what sort of e-mail volume is involved when litigators agree to keyword-search discovery? I could see the logic if you’re trying to sort through a database of, say, two million e-mails that covers many employees. In Hillary’s case we’re talking about 60,000 e-mails from one employee, a person who herself employs many aides who could help review each message. And unlike in litigation, there were no hard deadlines here. She had two years after leaving office to review the messages before State came knocking for them.

Update: The man has a point.

You know what doesn't show up in a key word search? Any words contained in a file attachment…or an embedded image.